Sprinkle Sprinkle Little Stars

Since childhood, Anita Woodley dreamt the future, able to predict imminent murders in her neighborhood. The Rhine Research Center is America’s oldest parapsychology lab and going to the Rhine Center was her doctor’s suggestion. Her doctor said she wasn’t alone, that there were others with her gift.

There is an unusual piece of carved grey stone in the hills of upstate New York. It depicts the boot of a notorious American villain who was shot in the leg during the Battle of Saratoga. Major General Benedict Arnold’s name is nowhere to be found on the inscription. Instead, it refers only to the "most brilliant soldier of the Continental Army”. The rest is implied.

For the last nine years, Ken Arnold and his wife Donna have operated an all-volunteer group called the Puget Sound Ghost Hunters. They put an ad up on their website and on their Facebook group inviting hunters to join their team. But before Ken and Donna offer membership, they arranged a trial ghost hunt to see how the candidates behave in the field. HBM producer Bethany Denton comes along to record the night’s activity.

Jacob is the owner of AntLife, a company that makes large ant farms. And during a cave-in, one of his ants became trapped in a small underground cavern, just inches from the surface. Despite his omniscience, he feels unequipped to deal with the ethical decisions required of him.

Growing up Mormon in Montana, Bethany Denton had a phrase drilled into her mind from an early age: “modest is hottest.” But by the time Bethany moved to Washington State for college, she had rejected the church and that’s when she met Helen. She invited Bethany to join her for an all-expenses paid nude vacation, courtesy of an eccentric tech millionaire who evangelized the merits of nudism.

There are about 10,000 files in the Here Be Monsters sound library. On this interstitial episode, Jeff plays back some of these heavily-used sounds and asks whether they occur because of an inherent goodness, a force of habit, or some kind of weird nostalgia he feels for the early days of the podcast.

The Way The Blood Flows is a short story written and read by Evan Williamson, who currently makes videos and music with his wife Sidra as they travel the world.

Ariadne, Jacqueline, North, and others unnamed are all part of the same system. They share a single body. They take turns “fronting” the body, controlling it. And when they’re not fronting, the system members are free to roam an infinite landscape, a pocket reality that they call the “in-world”.

When Dylan Wright placed his first Craigslist ad back in 2006, he called himself a “nice and genuine person with waking up problems.”  He was looking for someone to help him in the mornings.  First it was phone calls, but those didn’t work, so he moved on to something more personal.

Feeling anxiety about the American presidential election, HBM host Jeff Emtman took a trip to a place he hoped to be insulated from politics: PestWorld 2016, the largest American gathering of pest management professionals.